sidhos: I've played this game in the original form for thousands of hours(and also modded with Hyperion) back in the day. I was excited to see this on GOG, until I actually played it. I've restarted about 8 or 9 times and each time, the church starts banning technologies left and right. I mean, almost every turn, and also some of the most basic techs. Just this last attempt to play, it literally banned a starting tech at the top of the tech tree. By turn 10 or so, I'm already having the church sending ships/troops to burn my labs. This has to be a glitch. Right?
The difficulty level of each house affects how much the church proscribes techs. I don't know what the difficulty level of each house in your game is, but that is likely causing it.
If you would like to play without too much interference from the church, you can set all houses to beginner. As the total difficulty level of all the houses goes up, the frequency of tech banning will also go up. It will still happen if all houses are on beginner, but way way less frequently.
That being said, there is actually a known issue that will be fixed in the next version, where if you have a current game being played, then you restart the game using File > Restart, then the new game will have the Tech's Like values of the
old game. That means if you play a game with all houses on ridiculous for a while, see all the techs being proscribed that you should normally see on ridiculous, then you do File > Restart and set all the houses to beginner, you'll still get a bunch of techs proscribed. If this is what's happening to you, please entirely close down the game, then open the game up and start a fresh game with beginner difficulty across all houses (or easy if you prefer).